Listening to Tatxo Benet, CEO of Mediapro, speak in –apparently– perfect Mandarin and switch without problems to Arabic is not part of the skills of the manager of this company. And yet, it is possible. The AI laboratory that he has created together with the multinational Microsoft has been able to clone his voice to make him speak with perfectly intoned phrases without having to learn those languages.
Microsoft and Mediapro presented their agreement at ISE to launch an audiovisual AI laboratory within the Artificial Intelligence Center of the Catalan company. The collaboration between both companies “is not a technology issue; “This is a business issue,” said the president of Microsoft Spain, Alberto Granados, yesterday.
The objective of Mediapro and Microsoft is to define the use cases in which AI has a practical application in the audiovisual field. For example, in one of the cases presented, the voice of a Catalan presenter was cloned to narrate a football match in English with a pronunciation like that used by English channels, even with ambient sound also artificially recreated. The result is spectacular, as are the doubts about the effect of technology on jobs.
Benet assured that jobs will adapt to the advantages of AI, changing jobs, while Granados indicated that his company sees this technology as a co-pilot: “it is not going to replace us, it is going to accompany us. The last mile will always be done by human beings.” Microsoft is the main investor in OpenAI, ChatGPT's company.
